//------------------------------//
// Mother of Mercy 
// Story: Washed Up 
// by ambion 
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Captain Nauticaa was not in a good mood. She was not one given to ever having good moods, being more the type to feel that the stability of the ship beneath her, the crew around her and the weather above her was enough, if not for actual bona fide cheerfulness, than at least for satisfaction. Well, the sky and the sea had not reneged on their gift of fair winds, her ship did not so much sail the water as slide across it, but the crew...

Two out of three should not have been bad. Flotsam had still been a coughing lump dripping on her decks when she’d anticipated this trouble, that some of the more prone mares might agitate, that a few of the more tempestuous sort might variously heckle, harrass, even harrange the stallion.

This, she had decided, would have been tolerable. She was not his friend, his governess, or even his employer. Flotsam was to all intents and purposes a stowaway with a slightly better alibi than most. Beneath her notice.

Truely, the smooth running of the ship and the perfect weather, the very two things that should have made the third bearable were instead conspirators in making the situation the very worst it could be. The crew were getting idle in their work, and worse than that it was still faultless work. The foredeck was practically polished. They were getting bored. Empty headed and fanciful.

Eyes had wandered. Flotsam did clean up well, she admitted with a measured, uniterested factuality. His white coat caught the sunlight; Flotsam his name might be, but it didn’t do the shining seafoam projection of his colour justice.

It is not a Captain’s nature to blame themselves for bad judgement in the moment. After the fact, perhaps. In private reflection certainly. But this was not after the fact, nor was it private, and the foremost thought in Nauticaa’s mind was that this silliness - hedging onto obsession - with the danm male was getting out of hoof. 

She scrutinzed him. His gaze was held in hers, precarious between defiant and deferential. Like him she may not, obsess over him she may not, but even Nauticaa found Flotsam admittedly curious. He was the one thing in her kingdom she didn’t fully know. He made for a strange catalyst that had even the most familiar elements of her ship exhibiting strange chemistries. Even Harpoon, steady headed, humorless first mate Harpoon was getting restless about him, and while it was about time she knocked the pomp and pretense of the Quartermaster out through her ears, this was the wrong reason for which to do so.

His freedom, Nauticaa decided, had been too much of a liberty. Private quarters were not enough, no more than treasure left in an unlocked chest would have been. The Mother of Mercy sailed because everyone knew their place in the hierarchy of command. It was high time that the crew had that creed reinstated, branded anew across the forefront of their thoughts.

High time, she knew with distaste, to stake a claim on him and end this nonsense. She descended the foredeck. Stunned combatants hastened to remedy themselves of both conditions and hurry out of her way.

Before Nauticaa hung the overeager and underaccomplished crewmare tangled in the rigging. Hard Tack. Nauticaa advanced on her, sword drawn. If Flotsam caught the light like froth of the playful sea, the Captain’s saber shone with a cutting, painful brightness in the sunlight. Hard Tack caught her cold and furious gaze as the Captain advanced. Every effort was given to frantic wriggling, which did nothing to free the hapless mare and everything to further irritate the already peeved Nauticaa.

She thrusted the full stretch of her sword into the tangled mass, then slashed her blade free. The mess of knots opened like the gutted belly of a fish, spilling a mess of ropes and Hard Tack to the deck. That Hard Tack herself had not been split open or otherwise carved in any way whatsoever came as a great shock, one that was scrawled all over her face. The mare scrabbled out of Nauticaa’s way and was left as trivial.

The Captain had known which mares would shudder and which would not. This had not interested her. Flotsam had shuddered, and Patches very much so. To see that of the filly bothered her, but the Captain let none of it show. She passed through her crew like sharks through the reefs. Calm, slow, absolute in her authority.

Then it was only her and him. Nauticaa hoped until it twisted her insides that Patches wouldn’t say anything; the uncertainty writ plain in her ship’s filly was painful enough as it was. For the moment though, Patches said nothing.

Nauticaa stood eye to eye with Flotsam. Her private displeasure for what had to be done was transmuted into an expression of disdain. At least that she could use, sooner the better to be done with this.

“You will wait in my cabin,” she said, making a point to look him over. “Wash up before you do.”

It wasn’t loud. Volume would only have hindered the effect. The Captain didn’t linger. “Mend those ropes,” she growled to the nearest mare before stalking off. “And get back to work.”

Flotsam surrepitiously nudged Patches. “What just happened?” he whispered. All the eyes that had previously been eating him up were very quickly now spitting him out. His personal space was being...not respected, not exactly, but avoided. Hooves that had groped and wings that had lingered were fixed to bodies that now stringently curved around his position.

“What was that? Patches?”

The filly’s face was very slowly coming back from an ‘O’. She looked at him with worrying thought. “Thhe’th claimed you. You’re thwag,” the filly said with utmost severity. “You. Are. Thwag,” she stressed. 

Stomach knotting, skin crawling, Flotsam turned to his only friend. “What can I do?”

The filly thought on this for a torturously long moment. “Get watthed up,” she suggested tensely, “And wait in the Captain’th cabin. Thatth all you can do.”